Eternal Life Inc. (11 page)

Harry looked around to make sure their privacy shield was intact. “How many other people know about this?” he asked.

“Me, Doc, his research staff, and a few others who will not talk,” Chueh said.

“That’s it?” Harry asked as the implications of this began to sink in.

“Yes,” Chueh replied quietly, his eyes hooded.

“I am honored by your trust,” Harry said and bowed deeply.
He was also uncomfortably aware that he was in way over his head. Why would the most powerful Tong Godfather in the Empire trust someone like him with a secret like that? It didn’t make sense and that scared him.

“Time to go now, Harry,” Chueh said. He broke the privacy shield and called Mae back. “Don’t keep Doc waiting any longer.”

Harry hesitated.

“Is there something else?” Chueh asked with mild reproach.

Harry shrugged. What have I got to lose, he thought. I’m already in over my head.

“I saw something strange at the entrance to your garden,” he said.

Mae approached and Chueh waved her discretely back. The privacy screen closed around them again. Chueh cocked a questioning eyebrow at Harry, took a deep drag on his pipe, and waited.

Harry told him about the Norma-gene he had seen levitating just outside the entrance to the garden. He kept his word to Susan and didn’t mention their meeting. Instead, he finessed the truth and said that it was the same Norma-gene who had approached him earlier, begging for money outside the Eternal Life building.

When he finished, the old man nodded, his face expressionless. Then he fumbled in the pocket of his denim jacket and fished out a pair of old-fashioned horn-rimmed spectacles straight out of the nineteen-fifties. When he perched them on his nose, there was an almost instantaneous flicker as Chueh accessed his own private data-sphere. The spectacles flashed the results of his query directly onto his retinas, along with audio commentary. To an outside observer Chueh was just relaxing, smoking his opium pipe, his eyes hooded in peaceful contemplation.

Harry looked around. Mae had gone back to the other end of the bar. The gamblers on the other side of the room were still at it. One of them in particular caught his attention. He was dressed
like a cowboy and sat in the corner facing the bar. His wide-brimmed, white Stetson was pushed back on his head as he studied his cards. He was a big, raw-boned, handsome man, with a curl of black hair falling over his forehead. It took Harry a moment to realize he was seeing another one of Chueh’s eidolons, this one the classic Hollywood cowboy hero, John Wayne. The other four men were just what they seemed, underworld heavy hitters waiting for their bosses to conclude their business upstairs.

“Interesting,” Chueh mumbled at last and looked up.

“And?” Harry asked, trying to hide his impatience.

“And you were right,” he said. “Here, take a look.” Chueh looked directly into Harry’s eyes. The spectacles seemed to film over for a moment and then cleared, and suddenly Harry was looking at the street scene in front of the entrance to Chueh’s garden. He could see himself stop and look up a second after the Norma-gene appeared above the wall.

“You’re certain that’s the same Norma-gene you met earlier?” Chueh asked after the scene replayed to the finish.

Harry nodded. “Yeah, no doubt about it.”

“Hmm,” Chueh said, chewing thoughtfully on the stem of his pipe. Finally, he looked up and asked. “What do you know about Norma-genes, Harry?”

Harry shrugged. “As much as the next guy, I suppose,” he said.

“You know who Rielly Logan is, don’t you?” Chueh asked with a hint of exasperation.

“Sure, he’s supposed to be the new messiah of the Norma-genes.”

“And?” Chueh prompted.

“And about twenty years ago, he led ten thousand Norma-genes from Old Chicago across the Continental Quarantine to the promised land of Las Vegas. He set up his own country there, strictly for Norma-genes, and he’s pulled just about every
Norma-gene out of New Hollywood and everyplace else with a promise of giving them a new healthy body, remaking them in the image of their dreams.”

Harry stopped. Chueh gave him a disappointed, “is that all you got” look.

Harry sighed. “From what I’ve heard, he can really do it.”

Chueh waited, but Harry didn’t have anymore. Norma-genes and their new messiah were not on his top-ten hit list of things to know.

Chueh frowned. “You should go and see Doc now,” he said. “Then come back and see me afterwards.” He broke the privacy shield and gestured to Mae.

Harry bowed respectfully; and as he turned to go, Chueh added, “And Harry, you might want to keep up on the news better.”

19

An Eidolon’s Request

Mae led him up the stairs and through the holographic image of the wooden balcony that, like so much at Chueh’s, wasn’t really there. Instead, they turned down a silent, softly lit corridor with silk carpeting on the floors and a hint of opium in the air. He wondered in passing if the smell was real or if Chueh had added it just for atmosphere. The walls on either side were rice paper and bamboo with sliding doors reminiscent of a Japanese teahouse or maybe a Chinese opium-den.

Mae had been strangely silent on the way up. Now, she stopped in front of one of the doors and turned. “Here we are, Harry,” she said and gave him a bright, professional smile. It lasted all of two seconds before collapsing into a wounded little girl sob. There were suddenly tears in her eyes. “How did you know?” she asked. “Please, Harry,” she pleaded when she saw him hesitate. “I have to know what I did wrong.”

Harry looked into those pleading tear-filled eyes and thought, but you’re only a computer programmed eidolon, a holographic image wrapped around a repeller-field. How can you be feeling this?

“Please, Harry.”

Harry wondered what Chueh would make of this and then thought, screw it. He took Mae gently in his arms and whispered in her ear, “You didn’t do anything wrong. You’re perfect. No one else would even suspect.”

“But you knew,” she protested.

“That’s because I’m…” he groped for the right word, “…different. You see, I can feel people’s ka, and you didn’t have one.”

“That’s all?” she asked brightening up and smiling. “Then I
didn’t do anything wrong? Oh, Harry, I’m so glad.” And she leaned over and kissed him on the lips.

“Now, that definitely felt like the real thing,” he said, slightly flustered. “But can you tell me how you knew I knew?”

Mae rolled her big, china blue eyes heavenward as if to say, isn’t it obvious, and then she sighed. “A girl just knows that kind of thing.” Then she patted him on the cheek, turned and sashayed down the hall.

20

So Many Questions, so Few Answers

The sliding door, like the walls, seemed to be made of flimsy rice paper stretched over a delicate bamboo frame. In reality, these “flimsy rice paper” walls and doors were built of armored spider-spin on a titanium steel frame with reinforcing repeller-fields and were more solid than a bank vault. The Silver Slipper may have been impregnable, somewhere not on this earth, but Chueh believed in being thorough and always having backup.

Inside, the rooms had state of the art privacy curtains that were guaranteed bug proof. Whether it was a delicate business meeting, a discreet lover’s tryst, or high political wheeling and dealing, Chueh’s always guaranteed complete privacy, discretion, and security.

A mini grav-camera, hanging like a large pearl above the door, swooped down and looked Harry over. Then he heard the click of the latch being released. As the door slid aside, he realized that Doc wasn’t alone. A young woman sat across the table from him, studying an open electronic notebook.

She didn’t look up when Harry came in. Her short, black hair was parted in the middle and fell like raven’s wings on either side of her bowed head, concealing her features. Harry quirked a questioning eyebrow at Doc.

“Come on in!” The old man grinned. “Don’t just stand there gawking.”

Chueh prided himself on offering his clientele a wide range of beautifully appointed rooms in all sizes and decors. To his eternal disgust, Doc and Harry made a habit of choosing late twentieth-century truck-stop. This came complete with worn, green linoleum floors, dirty beige walls, maroon-colored vinyl upholstered benches, and marbled green Formica-topped tables
with little chrome record-selectors, containing the top jukebox hits from well over four hundred years ago.

The plate glass window on the opposite side of the room usually looked out on a parking lot full of long-haulers, but today Doc had opted for something altogether different in the “dry landscape” of one of lost Japan’s most famous gardens, the Ryoanji near Kyoto. The fifteen stones scattered across a bed of raked, white gravel were starkly enigmatic and somehow deeply moving. The late afternoon sun cast long shadows across the gravel ridges and furrows, turning them into silent, standing waves.

Harry wondered why Doc had chosen this particular scene. The contrast between the truck stop interior and the outside “landscape” was like one of those cryptic Zen koans, like “one hand clapping”, he thought, as he sat down beside Jericho.

At that moment, the woman across the table closed the notebook and looked up at Harry with frank curiosity, and his heart skipped a beat.

His first impression was of some exotic Botticelli Goddess, a Celtic Aphrodite maybe. Her skin was pale cream, her face a perfect oval. The nose was perhaps a little too long, but her eyes had an elfin tilt and were a startling jade green. She wore just a hint of ruby lipstick that accentuated the contrast between the cool cream of her skin and the jet black of her hair that fell straight and thick, cut in a curve to her chin.

She was elegantly dressed in a cobalt blue silk blouse, open at the throat, black silk “coolie” trousers and black patent leather ankle boots. She wore a pair of silver earrings shaped like crescent moons. A fine silver chain and locket were just visible in the open V of the blouse.

Harry stared spellbound. It had been years since the sight of a woman had moved him like this. In fact, not since Susan, he thought nonplussed and looked away, feeling strangely guilty and embarrassed.

The woman tilted her head and smiled with a kind of sympathetic amusement as if she was used to having this effect on men.

Harry glanced over at Doc. The old man tried to keep a poker-face but was obviously enjoying Harry’s discomfiture. He cleared his throat theatrically and said, “Harry Neuman, may I present Miss. Diana Lloyd. She’s got an interesting story to tell. I think it might throw some light on what happened to you last night.”

“Please just call me Diana,” she said with a slight, unidentifiable accent and offered him her hand.

Harry felt an almost electric jolt as their fingers touched. Her grip was firm and cool with surprising strength in the long tapering fingers. A moment later, he felt her gently pull her hand away and realized that he had been just standing there holding it.

He pulled his hand back in confusion and looked at Doc for help. He should have known better. The old man rolled his eyes like a lovesick Casanova, and Harry could hear him humming the wedding march under his breath.

“Okay, Doc, cut it out.” He laughed and sat down next to the old man.

“Cut what out?” Jericho asked with wide-eyed innocence.

Harry turned to Diana and grinned. “You got to excuse him,” he said and put his finger to his temple and made little circular motions. “Old age, you know. It catches up with you after a while.”

Diana smiled uncertainly and then put a hand to her mouth to stifle a laugh as Doc idiotically crossed his eyes and drooled his tongue out of the side of his mouth.

“Don’t encourage him.” Harry laughed. “Or he’ll be hamming it up all day.”

Doc straightened up and became as serious and dignified as a mortician at a mayor’s funeral. “When I was a child, I spoke as a child,” he intoned sonorously. “But now that I am a man…” He
winked and pulled the cord of an imaginary steam whistle. “WO-O! WO-O!” he said.

“Wo-o, wo-o? What’s wo-o, wo-o?” Harry threw up his hands in mock despair. “Jesus, Doc, you’re incorrigible,” he said.

“Incorrigible, but smart as a whip and charming to boot,” Doc added in a whispered aside to Diana.

Harry shook his head in despair and turned to Diana. “You see what I have to put up with,” he said. “If I…”

He had just time to think, “Oh shit, it’s happening again!”, as a black snout pushed out of Diana’s face. Her voice became a low, rumbling growl as she bared long, yellow fangs slathered with spittle. Her raven black hair became a gleaming black pelt as her whole body transformed into a huge black she-wolf.

Harry shoved away from the table and pushed to his feet with his heart pounding and his breath a bellow’s roar in his ears. Fear, anger, and a wild, inhuman blood lust, fought inside him. He felt a low growl start in the back of his throat. His muscles bunched to spring. He looked down at his hands clawing the tabletop and saw instead the paws of a gray timber wolf, his arms shaggy with matted fur.

The shock was like a splash of ice water. “My God, what’s happening to me?” His voice growled and he felt the timber wolf draw back at the sound of his voice, at this recognition of human identity. The sharp claws slid back into his fingertips. The pounding blood lust lifted like a red veil and his mind cleared. A last, deep growl gurgled into a soft moan of relief.

“Easy, Harry,” Jericho said. “Just take it easy. Whatever it is, it’s not real.”

Harry looked over at Diana. She was standing on the other side of the table, her face flushed, her hair disheveled, her breath coming in jagged gasps. A dark shadow lay across her face. He watched the shadow lift as she regained control. She heaved a deep, shaky sigh and ran her fingers through her hair.

She looked over and gave Harry a tentative smile. “Sailor, you
sure know how to show a girl a good time,” she said with a quaver in her voice that belied the quick bravado of her words. “Do you have this effect on all the girls you meet?”

Harry admired her spirit. He realized this was her way of getting it all back together and played along. “Only if they’re beautiful, elegant, and intelligent,” he said.

“Then I guess there’s something to be said for ugly, sloppy, and stupid.” She laughed and the tension eased.

Jericho watched this by-play with a kind of bemused fascination. Harry hadn’t looked at another woman like that since his divorce and despite the numerous stories of his sexual escapades, he’d been living like a monk for the last six months. Now, he was actually flirting. Jericho grinned, and with the wrong woman. This could get interesting.

Harry turned. “I sure hope you’ve got some answers, Doc,” he said and stopped when he saw Jericho’s grin. “Come on, Doc!” he cried with an angry no-nonsense edge to his voice. “This isn’t funny anymore. We just turned into wolves!”

“No, you didn’t,” Jericho said.

“We both saw it,” Diana said

“I can assure you both, nobody turned into a wolf,” Jericho said. “You growled and spit at each other like animals but no one turned into one.”

Diana took a deep breath and closed her eyes. She sat perfectly still, not breathing.

Harry sent Jericho a questioning look. The old man shrugged.

Finally, she gave a deep sigh and opened her eyes. “Jericho’s right,” she said. “We didn’t turn into wolves”.

“Then what happened?” Harry asked, looking from one to the other. The question covered more than just wolves now. It looked like Diana had just trance-walked into her ka for a few seconds to check out what had happened. She shouldn’t be able to do that, he thought. I can’t even do that. The only person he knew who could was Samuel Kade, and he was a professional shaman
trance-walker.

“I’m not sure what happened,” Jericho said and looked meaningfully at Diana.

She ignored the look and said, “There’s only one thing that Mr. Neuman and I have in common that might tie us to the wolves…”

“Of course!” Doc said.

“Of course what?” Harry asked.

“Patience,” Jericho said and turned to Diana. “My dear, do you mind?”

She hesitated a moment and then unbuttoned the sleeve of her blouse. When she rolled it up, Harry saw four, long, angry, red welts, slashing across her forearm.

“You recognize them?” Jericho said.

Harry nodded, too stunned to answer. They were the same scars he had seen in the mirror while dressing.

“She’s got more scars across her shoulder,” Jericho said as Diana rolled down her sleeve and buttoned it.

Harry looked at Diana. “How…Where?” he asked.

Diana shook her head and turned away.

“Later,” Jericho said. “First tell us how you got yours. What happened the other night?”

Harry looked at Diana again. She refused to meet his eye. Instead, she stared out the window, her face a closed, impassive mask. He shrugged. “Sure, why not?”

He told them what happened, choosing his words carefully. When he finished, he added, “They’re not wolves. They may look like them at first but that’s an illusion they hide behind. I caught a glimpse of what they really are just before the spin-generator caught my ka. I think the leader of the pack got caught in the event horizon of the spin-generator and it tore away the body, or whatever it is it was wearing, just before it clawed me.” Harry looked at Diana and Jericho. His eyes had a haunted, bruised look. “Believe me, they don’t look anything like wolves,” he said. “They don’t look like anything from this world.”

“Because they’re not,” Jericho said.

“But what are they? Where do they come from?”

Jericho looked over at Diana who nodded imperceptibly. “They’re the advance scouts of an alien army,” he said. “They come from another dimension, or maybe an alternate universe. They started riding into our world on the backs of resurrecting kas…

“So all the rumors are true about Eternal Life losing people,” Harry said.

Jericho nodded. “But that’s only one of the doors they use now to enter our world and it’s not always a reliable one,” he said. “They’ve got a powerful ally in the Nevada Quarantine who opened the original door to them over twenty years ago, and we never even knew it,” Jericho added with surprising bitterness, as if for some reason he should have.

Harry began putting it together in his mind. Nevada Quarantine meant Norma-genes. He thought of the Norma-gene that had materialized at the entrance to Chueh’s garden, and he remembered Chueh asking him what he knew about Rielly Logan. “This mysterious ally wouldn’t happen to be a Norma-gene by the name of Rielly Logan, would it?” he asked.

Jericho winked at Diana. “The boy’s not as dumb as he looks!”

Harry grinned. “You sure know how to bring out the best in people, Doc.”

Jericho gave a self-deprecating shrug. “It’s a talent,” he said and asked, “How did you get it so fast?”

Harry shrugged. “It’s a talent.” He laughed. Then he told him about meeting the same Norma-gene outside the Eternal Life Building and later at the garden entrance. Once again, he left out any mention of Susan. “Later Chueh asked me what I knew about Rielly Logan,” Harry concluded. “And I just put two and two together.”

He was tempted to tell Doc about Susan and what Roger had done to her, but he’d promised her. Besides, he realized he would
feel slightly shy and a little embarrassed talking about Susan in front of this other woman. Instead, he decided to talk to Jericho later. It was a decision he would live to regret.

Jericho was perceptive enough to know that Harry wasn’t telling him everything and eyed him skeptically.

Harry shot a quick glance at Diana and shook his head imperceptibly.

Doc got the message and leaned back and steepled his fingers thoughtfully. “I wonder if they know we’re here,” he said thoughtfully.

“Why would they care?” Harry asked.

“It’s a long story,” Jericho said and then changed the subject. “It sounds like they’re keeping an eye on you, Harry.”

“Could be just a coincidence,” Harry suggested without much conviction.

Doc pursed his lips and shook his head. “I don’t think so? Not right after the wolves made a run at you in your last resurrection and almost succeeded.”

“They tried twice before, I think,” Harry said.

“So-o-o,” Doc leaned forward, rested his chin on his fist, and looked at Harry. “You never told me,” he said.

Harry shrugged. “I didn’t think it was important. I wasn’t even sure they were there the first time. The second time they were nothing but indistinct shadows. I outran them both times. Besides, we haven’t been doing a lot of comparing notes lately.”

He didn’t mean it as a reproach. When the old man placed him under Samuel Kade’s care, he’d also agreed to butt out and let the trance walker take over Harry’s training on the assumption that too many cooks spoiled the soup. The upshot was that even though Jericho was present during the last few months at Harry’s resurrections, he held no debriefings afterwards.